Poet, writer, translator

REVIEW OF GLACIATION – POETRY WALES

Will Stone’s Glaciation comes with an intriguing endorsement: ‘Will Stone is the sharp-eyed beachcomber on the shore of our self-destruction’, writes Hugo Williams, before enjoining us to ‘read him before the tide comes in.’ There is something resonantly downbeat about Stone’s poetic vision, with poems that break out into sharp points of pain before settling back into the muffled suffering that is their bass note.

Like Batchelor, Stone works in his own poetic hinterland, and in his case it is one (to carry on the beachcombing metaphor) of shored fragments and coastal edges, where the landscapes of East Anglia and Suffolk meet those of northern Europe. Glaciation’s epigraph is a line from Shelley describing the glaciers ofChamonix as a ‘city of death […] yet not acity but a flood of ruin’. Stone’s poems take this idea of a ‘flood of ruin’ to extremes of cultural pessimism, as in ‘Exodus’, a nightmarish vision of a consumer society’s implosion overlaid with the scenario of a disaster movie. It’s one of the best poems in the book, but has its dragging counterweight in ‘Exploring Culture’s Wreck’, which bellows out with disappointing crudeness what so many of the other poems suggest more effectively: the author’s sense of being out of his time and out of his place, and therefore only at home in a time and place of his own imagining. This time and place is usually late 19th century Europe, when, perversely enough, writers like those Stone most admires themselves wanted to be somewhere else and at some other time. Such is the irony of the fin de siècle trope: nothing marks one out as being of one’s time more than wanting to be out of it, and the book could have done with a little more of that ironic awareness. At his best, Stone is a poet of place, but of place etherealised and clouded over by a relationship between landscape and emotion that is no less powerful for being tenuous. Stone is the author of a book on the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, all of which helps to create an unusual if oddly consistent set of cultural bearings for his poems to open out into: melancholy, suggestion, moments of bile barely swallowed back, and a peculiar form of perpetual woundedness that gives these poems their unmistakeable timbre. It’s no surprise to learn that Stone is also a distinguished translator, notably of Belgian masters of melancholy such as Georges Rodenbach and Emile Verhaeren (about whose painful and absurd accidental death we have a poem here), French poets such as Nerval and Baudelaire, and Germans such as Georg Heym. Another presence is Sebald, to whose memory one of the book’s most powerful poems, ‘SS Fort Breendonk’, is dedicated. Stone manages to bring that European melancholy into English without making it sound bloated, over-theatrical or lacking in literary context. It is not an easy thing to bring off, especially as Stone’s preference is for the dramatic and often self-dramatizing streak in European poetry. But his solution works: he adds a layer of English muffling, a sort of insulation effect, that tamps down the grand emotional claims that work in Symbolist French or Expressionist German but can’t be carried in English. These two first collections look determinedly beyond the usual parameters and are in many ways out on a limb. It’s a good place to be – these poets have their contexts and they have rich literary traditions to work in. They may invoke or celebrate other writers, but they can never be mistaken for them.